Kepler had been banging his head against the same theories for hours, locked up in his lab, working them to the bone. It got to the point where he was literally tempted to bash his forehead on his desktop when Mercury leapt forward, spun his chair back, and pushed him, wheels and all, out into the sub hallway, where the Scorbunny tipped the chair over and dropped Kep to the floor with a clang.

“Owch. Fuck. Fuck you.” Kep muttered, miserably staring into his reddening palms as Merc dropped a handful of Pokeballs on Kepler’s lap and pointed violently down the hallway. He may not have been capable of human speech but the meaning was clear. Take a break, nerd.

Shakily, Kepler pushed himself to his feet, slipping the Pokeballs into his belt under his oversized sweater and setting off. Maybe one lap would do him some good.

He had just come to a T-Junction hallway when what he’d thought was the distant sound of the submarine settling actually turned out to be the approaching scream of someone running very, very fast. In a blink the person had sprinted past him, screaming the entire way. Kepler leaned forward to look down the hallway, watching the figure bounce in and out of the circular pot-lights in the ceiling; then, he looked the other way, expecting, at the very least, a very angry higher up hot on the poor grunt’s tail.

Finding nothing but open space, Kepler frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers.

“Why are people so fucking weird?” the scientist who’d just spent a week in the same room with no outside human contact groaned.

Rico Bassanello

☉

Bass kept screaming like a distraught housewife until his lungs were bereft of air. It took him a moment to realize that he'd just sprinted past a fellow Rocket. Him running away like a coward definitely did not bode well for his image. If the other grunts found out that he was a scaredy cat, they'd bully the everliving crud out of him.

Maybe he could turn things around, though, by using that (admittedly pretty cute) youth as a meatshield. At the end of the same hallway he'd run away screaming from, where there was previously nothing, one could now make out a shadowy silhouette with elongated, pointy ears and a lightning bolt-shaped tail. Who's that Pokemon?

"Kyuuu!"

"It's Pikachu!" The white-clad grunt cried out, his body still aching from his last encounter with one of those electric rodents. Standing behind Kepler, he hurled a Pokéball forward. "Czar, exterminate that rat with your Dark Pulse!" He ordered his Alolan Meowth, which fired a wave of darkness and malice towards the completely stationary 'Pikachu'.

kepler brueshaber

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In a blink the person was back. Kepler shook his head and stepped back a bit, thinking maybe he was seeing things-- but then he looked, again, in the direction Rico had run in from and saw a mysterious shape that did, for Rico’s credit, look remarkably like a Pikachu.

Kepler had more or less stepped out into the hallway, and incidentally had turned to face away from Rico. So, yes, the other Grunt was using him as a shield. Hurray.

Now, Kepler was a man of science and science reasoned that if it walked like a Pikachu, and talked like a Pikachu, then it was a Pikachu. So when Rico tossed out his Meowth, and the Meowth, in turn, tossed out its dark pulse, he had no reason to doubt the success of either of these things. Cool, grand, problem solved.

“That’s what you were running from?” Kep said, voice a tired snort. Mercury stood nearby at the ready in case he was needed to engage.

Rico Bassanello

☉

The effeminate-looking boy questioned why Bass had made such a fuss about a Pikachu. Clearly he hadn't experienced the terror that was Pikachu's Thunder Wave. "It made a scary noise at me!" Bass replied, being all defensive.

The Dark Pulse connected, causing the head of the 'Pikachu' to droop limply to the side. "You broke its neck! Good job, Czar!" The white-clad grunt exclaimed, but his celebration was cut short when the creature started to sway deftly in the shadows. "Huh?! How is it still moving?!".

The 'Pikachu' merged with its own shadow, sneaking behind the Alolan Meowth, before emerging from the floor and striking the cat with an elongated, black claw that came out of the bottom part of its body.

In that moment, its form became clearer; the 'head' was just a decoy with a badly drawn face, the creature's actual body being concealed under a pale yellow sheet.

"Mi-mic... Youuuu!"

kepler brueshaber

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“Oh, a scary noise,” Kep said, rolling his eyes so hard he got a little dizzy. “Yep, that’ll do it.” The sarcasm was thick in his tone but his head really was starting to hurt. Sometimes he theorized it was because he spent so much time on the sub that the pressure got to him-- like in the movie The Abyss.

Other times he theorized that he was just allergic to idiots.

His eyebrows knitted as the Pikachu’s head sloughed to the side, limp. That… that did not compute. There was no noise, for one. Breaking bones tend to be rather audible. His brain was still running through the numbers when the thing moved.

A blink later and the strange grunt’s Meowth was being raked by claws from behind them. Kepler spun, actually dizzy this time, and backpedaled. “Holy fuck!” He yelled, feeling the swift sting of karma as bile in his throat. “M-Merc! Get it!”

His Scorbunny, fearless in the face of danger, nobly jumped forward to deal a one-two double kick to the thing, pivoting and switching feet as he went--

--only to have both attacks pass through it, harmlessly.

Mercury paused up on one foot, head at a tilt, staring curiously at the creature. It was clad in a pale yellow-sheet, with a poorly drawn Pikachu face underneath crooked ears.

“Fuck!” Kepler yelled, turning to run for real.

Rico Bassanello

☉

Within seconds, the flamboyant grunt's focus was divided between checking on Czar's injuries and trying to catch up with his foul-mouthed, retreating cohort. "H-hey, you can't just run away and leave me behind! Rockets should stick together!" He cried out, cradling the Meowth in his arms and running after the effeminate youth.

The sussy Pikachu impostor gave chase, once again blending into the shadows on the wall. It was wicked fast too, easily outrunning the two grunts and cutting in front of them, blocking their escape route. In a submarine where everything was so compact, there weren't many places to run to anyway.

"Eeek! Czar, fire another Dark Pulse!" Bass yelled in desperation. The second wave of dark energy courtesy of his Meowth knocked the strange, Pikachu-like creature backwards. "Aha! We hit it this time!" The grunt said with a wide grin.

Getting back on its feet, or lack-thereof, the creature's shadowy claw reached backwards, plucking out its own 'tail', which was apparently just a tree branch with a black, ink-like substance dripping from its tip. Using it like a pen, it scribbled a pair of angry eyebrows to its childish doodle of a face.

Shit'd just gotten real.

kepler brueshaber

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“Yes I can!” Kepler yelled over his shoulder, heart racing in his chest, “I’m doing it right now!” Distantly, he heard the thunder of Rico’s feet behind him and the rabbit-quick steps of Mercury, who was… also running. Oh, god. That was bad, wasn’t it?

The strange creature jumped out in front of them again and Kepler yelped, stumbling backwards into Rico who’d slid to stop behind him. He flailed his limbs to try and get balance, sort of bouncing off the other grunt, then the wall, and falling to his ass on the hard, metal floor. Years of inactivity and poor health decisions were catching up to him-- the panic was welling in his chest, his limbs were trembling, and he was taking big, gulping breaths, trying to suck air into his lungs.

Rico, much more in control of his facilities, ordered his Pokemon to attack; when the hit landed and the other grunt celebrated, Kepler sat up a bit, but then the creature hopped right back up and drew its angry eyebrows on and--

Think, Kepler, think, he squeezed his eyes shut, backpedaling on his hands and knees. He wasn’t used to this kind of action. There was a reason he locked himself in his lab, dammit! Dark Pulse hit the thing. He didn’t have any Pokemon with Dark-type moves. He was hyperventilating now. Think, Kepler. Double kick didn’t have any effect.

“It’s a ghost!” He yelled, scrabbling for purchase on the wall of the sub with sweaty palms. “I mean, fuck. It’s a Ghost-type.” See how things worked better when he was thinking instead of screaming?

Mercury picked up what Kepler was laying down and bounded forward, bouncing off his trainer’s head (“Owch! Fuck you!”) into a tight somersault and coming down fast and hard at the strange thing with the drawn-on face.

Rico Bassanello

☉

"Kyuuuuu!"

The creature cried in pain as the Bounce connected. Kepler's assertion about its typing was likely correct, and its defenses seemed to have been lowered now that it had sustained a couple of hits. It tried to make a quick getaway, but its sheet got caught up in the Scorbunny's foot.

"Hurrah! Looks like we scared it off! Wait..." Much to Rico's surprise, the sheet slipped off, unveiling the creature's true form under the room's poor lighting. And it was a good thing that the lighting was poor, because its form was horrid beyond comprehension; a writhing, amorphous mass of black tendrils.


"̨̼͍̟̬͖͈̣̆̆̈́͛̏̚K̸̢̡͕͓̺͎̖͇̂ͩͮͬ͑ͨ͂ỹ̵̱̝̲͖͔ͨ̂͋̂̎́̈û̶̺̦̯̬̹̦ͯ̾͆̑̚ư͎̞̩̹̥͚̼͖ͪ͛̀͡ű̷̝̮̤̯͉͈͚͓ͪͮ̅́u̸̺̲ͧͮͧͪ͆ͨ͌̐ͅư̸̷̟̟̘̓͛ͦ̓͐u͇̒͆̓̋̃̾̽͘͟͜ų̵͇̯ͭͥͥ̋͒̾ͮ̉u͔̻͈̥ͫ̃ͩ͐̂͘!̢̹̳̹̝̹͉́́"̛̛̞͑̏ͣͤͦ̆ͦ


It was a wretched abomination humans were not meant to lay eyes upon. Their brains couldn't fully process what they were seeing, registering it as a blur. Czar's eyes rolled to the back of his head, fainting from sheer shock. The cat's utterly mortified trainer wasn't that far behind. "W-w-w-w-w-what the hell is that thing?!"

kepler brueshaber

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Mercury, first victim at close range, felt his normal indomitable courage fail as he grabbed the sheet and hid underneath it, pulling it over his head like a child cloaking himself in his bedsheets and being safe from the monster in the closet.

Kepler’s brain-- his beautiful, above-average, powerful brain-- froze on the spot. He was transported back, back back, back to the real, visceral fear that maybe the first humans felt, staring into the unmapped abyss and knowing everything out there wanted to, and was capable of, destroying them.

He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry and he was frozen and he was just this side of dehydration to not piss himself. He was frozen, absolutely frozen to the spot, with the kind of irrational fear that holds hands with phobias, not the normal kind of fear that permeates everyday life.

He figured his heart had stopped and he’d die when Mercury’s second rabbit instinct kicked in and he bolted out from under the sheet, agility causing his feet to burn marks into the metal hallway. The Scorbunny grabbed Kepler and Rico and ran away, whipping them off their feet and causing them to oof and ahh as they bounced and bumped against the floor of the hall in their hasty retreat.

Rico Bassanello

☉

Mercury to the rescue! The fiery rabbit that could proved to everyone that he really was capable of high quality animation if he put his mind to it, grabbing both humans in a pinch and bailing them out of a truly desperate situation.

Strangely, the abomination made no attempt to chase after them this time, instead snatching its discarded sheet with one of its obscene appendages. Was hiding its hideous form more important to the creature than the pursuit of its prey?

After a while, its distorted cries could no longer be heard. It seemed as if they had lost it... for now. After the group had retreated to safety, Rico would lean against one of the sub's metallic walls, catching his breath. "Hah... I thought I was a goner for sure." He said, while clutching a still passed out Czar in his arms. He turned to his fellow Rocket. "What do we do now? That thing is probably still at large."

kepler brueshaber

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Listen, that was how rabbits worked: they froze, then they ran.

Kepler cursed as his tailbone jolted off the floor of the hallway for a third-or-fourth time, honestly, he’d lost count and he hurt. This was a lot more action than he normally saw in one day.

Eventually Mercury skid to a stop, pawpads dragging a burnt, black line into the hallway. The Scorbunny tilted forward, panting slightly, still clinging to both grunts by the back of their shirts.

Kepler winced and stood up, then bent over, grasping at the bruises surely forming along the side of his body.

“I have,” he panted, “an idea. It’s kind of… a long shot. But… I think it’s the only shot we have.”

He stood up, closing his eyes and then opening them again because all he saw when they were shut was that eldritch horror writhing against his eyelids. With shaking fingers he released Venus, his Golett.

“To take down a ghost… you need… a ghost,” he said, straightening his back with a powerful crack and leaning on his forearm on the wall. And lucky for them, he had the friendliest ghost in the world right at his disposal.

“Venus,” he said, jerking a thumb weakly in the direction they’d run in, “go make a friend.”

The little Automaton saluted, then turned and stomped away, heading towards the eldritch abomination they’d run from, her heavy footfalls echoing along the hall.

Rico Bassanello

☉

Thank Arceus, his fellow Rocket had an idea! If he saved his bacon for a second time tonight, Rico would be forever indebted to him. Having surmised by now that their enemy was not in fact a Pikachu but instead some kind of Ghost type, he intended to send another Ghost type to deal with it.

"Wooh, that's a very solid plan, if I do say so myself! I'd help too, but all I have is a bunch of Meowth." The white-clad grunt remarked, hiding behind the manlier and much more physically imposing Kepler.

And so, the plan was set into motion, Kepler's Golett slowly approaching the monstrosity, who had once again donned its Pikachu-like disguise. Something in Kepler's particular choice of words seemingly resonated with the unholy creature.

Friend?

It made no attempt to attack Venus as she drew near, dropping its defenses.

Make... friend?

The angry eyebrows it had sketched earlier were gone, making its eyes look almost as if they were... pleading.

Make friend... with me?

kepler brueshaber

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By the time Venus had toddled her way down to the Mimikyu, her steady, childlike steps echoing in Kepler’s ears as a reverb of his pulse, the thing had put itself back together and was sitting upright again. He swallowed, hoping beyond hope that this worked, because not only would they have to go back down and deal with that eldritch abomination if it didn’t, but he would also look like a maroon in front of this decidedly imbecile imbecile.

It wasn’t a fair assumption, of course. He didn’t really know Rico, but Kepler was smarter than, well, most everyone. It was just a fact of life-- and why he scored ‘highly toxic’ on most personality tests.

Venus played her part perfectly-- she was the nicest Pokemon on Kepler’s team, for numerous reasons. Namely, she wasn't intelligent enough to be mean. She extended her arm in a mechanical wave, crude three-fingered hand splaying and tick-tocking back and forth in greeting. She made no move to attack, instead nodding her assent at the Mimikyu’s assumption of friendliness. Her head went up and down with a grinding noise, stone moving against stone.

Yes! Friend!

Rico Bassanello

☉